“Be my guess. The only other Natives I’ve met are her parents who, I’m overjoyed to relate, are involved in my murder case, and I had to get Wy to fly me across the Bay to meet them. Newenham was majority Yupiq. It looked like Alaska. This place looks like, I don’t know. Idaho. You know. If Idaho wasn’t landlocked.”

“How is Wy?”

“Fine. She sold her air taxi in Newenham. She’s figuring out what she wants to do next.”

“She keep both planes?” A pilot’s question.

“Yeah. She meant to sell the Cub but when it came right down to it she couldn’t.”

“Don’t blame her. Got a place to live?” Jim had thoroughly enjoyed the story of Liam’s Progress through Newenham housing.

“Yeah, a nice one. Local guy built it for his wife and two kids. Kids are gone and he opened a brewpub in town and moved in over the shop. For sale by owner, saved us a ton of money. Got a hell of a view. I can’t get too close to the edge of the yard because we’re right on the bluff that backs up the town and it is seriously all downhill from there.”

Another slurp. “How far away are you from retirement?”

“Two years.”

“You can always pull the plug. I haven’t looked back.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Liam said. “The thing is, I don’t know what the hell else I’d do if I did. All I know is I don’t want to live in Anchorage, and I sure as hell don’t want any job that involves interacting with the goddamn legislature.”

“You can always say no.”

“You’ve met John Barton, right?”

A laugh. “Yeah. Still. You’re a grown ass man, Liam. Figure out what you want and make your own damn decisions.”

If only I knew what that was, Liam thought after he’d said goodbye and hung up.

Nineteen

Friday, September 6

WY SPENT THE MORNING UNPACKING, and then made a trip to the grocery store. There were two in Blewestown and neither of them was AC, a nice change from Newenham, where, like almost everywhere else in Alaska that was not on the road system, the Alaska Commercial Company had a lock on the sale of groceries.

It amused her to stand in line and eavesdrop. The cashiers seemed to know all the customers, the customers appeared to be all local all the time, and they were united in their joy at the end of tourist season and the beginning of the school year. She was picking up the local vernacular, too. For starters, almost none of the locals called Blewestown “Blewestown”. It was the Bay, or Baytown, or B-town, or, sometimes, Chungasqak. This last was employed with the emphasis that Alaskans in general used in calling Denali Denali and never McKinley, an Outsider who’d never even been to the state. She resolved to look up the meaning of “chungasqak” as soon as she got home, and Kapilat, Engaqutaq, and Chuwawet while she was at it. There was no one here to discourage her from learning the local Native language, so why not?